Jennifer Glick's List: Gender Specific Classrooms

• Leonard Sax
• • What about single-sex classrooms within the same school?
• They developed differently, he argued, so schools should 'stop being gender  blind' and teach them separately
• Sax founded the National Association for Single Sex Public Education and wrote a  book, Why Gender Matters
• 130 independent schools that taught girls and boys separately have either  become co-educational or closed
• Wednesday will conclude that there is no evidence that children achieve more at  single-sex schools
• Fifty years of research into the subject does not support the 'bold claims' made  by the heads of these schools
• The report will conclude that gender has very little impact on how well a school  performs. Instead, ability and social background drive results
• Like many others she argues that girls are more likely to take non-traditional  subjects like maths and physics if they are taught among their own sex, but this  popular claim is undermined by Smithers's study
• But the study also shows that there is no clear advantage to co-education either
• teenagers from single-sex schools struggle socially at university when thrown  into a mixed environment
• She argues: 'There are a number of bestselling authors that [say] there are  important gender differences in the brain and auditory system such that girls  and boys see the world differently, so are best educated in single-sex schools.
• Race and social class are far better predictors of outcomes
• Moreover, boys and girls did not neatly fit into two groups

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